'Road & Track' magazine

Quick Thought - I find myself these days actually looking forward to each months delivery of R&T. I like the format and have found in recent months at least a couple of well written pieces (whether historical or current) in each issue.......

I like R & T, I have most of the issues going back to 1980. I think for the price its pretty good value, much better than C & D or Automobile, Motor Trend does not even deserve a mention. R & T has usually been a plesent read.

I have always enjoyed the Salon articles, I just wish someone would publish a compilation book on Salon articles like Phil Hill has done with his Ferrari articles.

Over the past few years, there has been a big drop in the quality of their motorsport coverage. I was beginning to think they should change the name of the magazine to 'Road'. It has improved lately, but I still miss the good old days when Rob Walker and Innes Ireland gave in depth Grand Prix reports, as well as Rob's annual driver ratings.

That being said, I still find it superior to the competition and Peter Egan's column is always a pleasure to read.

I stopped actually reading it very closely at some point in the 1980s, but continued to subscribe out of habit until maybe three or four years ago when I finally dropped it -- after many, many years of reading it (from about 1953/1954). I have not looked at a copy lately, but this might be a good prompt to do so. I was never really "bad," just not what I was really interested in, the salon features being about all I actually did read, generally ignoring the rest of it. I will take the time to take a look.

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Originally posted by snash
I still miss the good old days when Rob Walker and Innes Ireland gave in depth Grand Prix reports, as well as Rob's annual driver ratings.
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I am old enough to miss the always entertaining Formula One reports of Henry N. Manney III.

The articles by Sam Posey in recent years have justified the subscription price for me, but I read Car and Driver to keep up with the new vehicle offerings. While Car and Driver has periods of apparent bias, and a current trend towards being one big compendium of advertising quote fodder(when is the last time they gave a vehicle a really negative review?), Road & Track has managed to hold onto a pattern of consistent bias for the 27 years I've been reading them. The end result is that their opinions are of negative value to car shoppers. I pitty anyone who bought a British car on their recommendation at times when British cars were the least reliable and durable on the market, with the exception of French cars, also an editorial favorite, and it is too bad for loyal readers who missed out on the joys of German cars due to often luke warm reviews, or who missed out on some of the better American car offerings due to R&T bias that goes back to the day when they were formed as a journal for people seeking an alternative to the US establishment. For those of us reading more than one monthly, it is hard not to notice over time that US cars produce their worst performance numbers at Road & Track, while British cars produce their best. German and Italian cars tend to perform about the same for Road and Track as for others, while Japanese cars are alternately celebrated or faulted without much relation to the realities of the cars and their competitors. I suppose it could be argued that they aren't consistent about Japanese cars, other than that they are seen as better than American cars and worse than British cars. Reading Road & Track through the years, you'd think that British cars would have driven all others off the market.

I remember buying my first R&T issue. Nov_1966. The issue has a Porsche 906 on the cover.It shone among the other motor magazines...so I bought it.And since...I bought i until the beginning of the 80;s.I beleieve R&T sold a lot on it`s catchy covers...and then the reader found out what a good magazine it was.Well...I must say...in the beginning of the 80;s...it was not interesting for me anymore...except for some issues I guess.I still have most of them...except for some that was in fact stolen from me.Staff.

I have most of them from the mid fifties to the early eighties-around the time that "Our Henry" left us. The magazine never recovered from that in my(not so humble) opinion. As I have reported here previously HNM111 referred to R&T as "That know nothing magazine with the know nothing editor"! Since the early eighties I think that R&T has sunk almost to the level of Motor Trend. I used to be amazed that the British magazines would laud R&T so. Too generic, too oriented toward new street/road cars. I am sure if you did a survey of the covers you would find a Corvette on more covers than any other brand or type of car.

Innes Ireland wrote a piece on Ferraris he had known and loved that was published in R & T about 20 years ago. I cannot for the life of me recall the name of the article right now but it is one of my favorite automotive-related writings, ever.

I have a complete set of Road & Track, back to the first issue of June 1947. There are two obvious problems with the magazine today.

1) The current automotive situation in the world just isn't particularly interesting to me any longer.

2) The magazine is DRASTICALLY overstuffed with ads. Just as an example, taking the current issue of February 2005, you have a 162 page magazine with about 85 pages fully taken up with ads. Ads, ads, ads, ads......... I don't care to pay for a magazine that is more than 50% ads. They should pay ME to take it home.

Originally posted by JB Miltonian 2) The magazine is DRASTICALLY overstuffed with ads. Just as an example, taking the current issue of February 2005, you have a 162 page magazine with about 85 pages fully taken up with ads. Ads, ads, ads, ads.........

R&T is the only American new car magazine I read regularly. To me, at least, it has a reasonable balance between sports cars and the sorts of cars normal people buy. The articles are long enough and well written, so I don't feel like I've wasted the time reading it. Also, compared to say Motor Trend (without a doubt my least favorite) and Car and Driver (which comes across as a car magazine written for people who don't like cars all that much, by people who don't like cars all that much), R&T's technical info is very good. Dennis Siminaitis clearly knows his stuff, and writes about extremely boring technical details in an entertaining, easy for an idiot like me to understand way.

However, I have to agree with what JB Miltonian said-there's not a whole lot going on that I really have to read about, and there are waaaaay too many adverts. Granted, I can level the same criticism to most car magazines.

..I think I pay just over $1 per issue delivered, so its getting close..............

Don't get me wrong - R&T ain't perfect and arguably isn't as good as it was - but it does have a couple of regular writers I like (Egan and Judd) and has a 2 or so long text based articles a month that we here seem to crave. So I thought it was worth a little postive recognition......

Now the one thing it doesn't seem to do is to use photo archives to any extent - wonder whether it has an extensive one?

Well, Snash (post 16) - just as a comparison, the new issue of Sports Car International that I brought home last night has 96 pages, of which 12 are taken up with full page ads. That means there is more content in 96 pages of SCI than there is in 162 pages of R&T. So it's possible to crank out a nice, glossy, enthusiast-themed magazine that doesn't make you want to throw it in the fire. I still buy R&T every month, and I enjoy the occasional article in it, but I don't rate it highly.

Ad content in the primary US monthlies is heavy, and annoying as all heck when the ads are designed to create permanent book marks, but the subscription prices of about a dollar an issue go a long way towards making up for it.

Originally posted by JB Miltonian Well, Snash (post 16) - just as a comparison, the new issue of Sports Car International that I brought home last night has 96 pages, of which 12 are taken up with full page ads. That means there is more content in 96 pages of SCI than there is in 162 pages of R&T. So it's possible to crank out a nice, glossy, enthusiast-themed magazine that doesn't make you want to throw it in the fire. I still buy R&T every month, and I enjoy the occasional article in it, but I don't rate it highly.

SCI, a bi-monthly, has a subscription price that is two and a half times an issue as expensive as the monthlies. So I guess all those ads are good for something.

But mostly, an oddball story, how Innes Ireland learned to steal military equipment.

I certainly hope my son is keeping up my subscription... when he went to America to live he said he'd get it for me and send it over in batches. I've had the first batch arrive, about 15 issues... let's see... that was in 1995?

Bought my first one in 1960. Looked forward to if for many years. Saved every issue, still have many of them. But about 10 or 12 years ago, about time the publishers changed, I stopped even looking at it. Now I just read Peter Egans column on the web. Sad to see what had become of a great magazine.
Of course, Racer, Forumla, and others of that ilk may have had something to do with it, and the much improved TV coverage, via cable had a lot to do with my lack of desire to wait for a monthly to see race results.

I read the rag... it's pretty good for general info, not much in the way of "Track" for over a decade now. However, Peter Egan is always a fun read. He always seems to touch on things that have happened to me.

Speaking of Cyclops - one was spied last year at the Phoenix, HSR-West race...

R&T was once a great magazine. For most of it's life it was the primary US source of news regarding European racing and cars. Their F-1 and significant race coverage was second to none (Bernard Cahier-->Henry Manney III-->Rob Walker-->Innes Ireland). In a lot of ways R&T struck me as an American version of Motorsport. Just my impression.

I discovered the magazine after a visit to the 1976 NY Auto Show. My first issue was Feb 1976, the cover photo was of a Lamborghini Countach. Since that time, I have managed to collect 98% of the issuesd dating from the early 1950's to the mid 1990's.

While reading an issue dated mid 90's I realized that the magazine was not what it once was. I recall analysing a road test and coming to the conclusion that while the article took up 4 pages, there were maybe 2 paragraphs that that were based upon the experiance of actually driving the car ! The rest of the text was glorified ad copy that was creatively adapted from brochures and press releases. No value. Combine that with the declining race coverage and I decided to no longer purchase the mag. If I have any reqrets about leaving it behind, it would be for their Salon and retrospective articles as well as Peter Eagan.

The R&T with the cover of Gurney in the Eagle was what led me to my lifelong love of motorsport. I can still remember standing by the magazine stand in the Kroger just down the street from our house in Atlanta, waiting for my mother to find me with the cart so that I could ask her to buy it for me. That picture of the Eagle was the most fascinating thing I had ever seen to that time. I can also remember the happiness I felt when she said yes, and I took it home.

The coverage of F1 was what did it for me. I soon had a subscription, and Rob Walker's reports were always the first thing I went to when new issues arrived. Sadly, as the 70's wound down and my time and resources went toward school anda career, I quit subscribing and when I came back to motorsport, the magazine no longer held for me what it once did. Now it's my son who asks me to buy it.

Other than F1, I also remember how my dad, a university librarian with NO interest in cars or motorsport, was fascinated by the Electrophant and the straight-12 Jag reports. Funny stuff!

I've a long time subscriber from back when F1 coverage was spotty at best in the 70's. I've always loved the April issue and some of the April-fools road tests like a Porsche tractor, to a HopRod (powered pogo-stick) to Sam Posey's sled dog experience. I've always wondered how many accidents the the backwards bodied Impala caused in issues when the lamponed themselves in "Rod & Truck". I haven't seen that in years. I still like Eggan's articles, the historical articles such as Gurney back in the F1 Eagle, and some of the technical articles. I get the racing articles from Autoweek (that I used to get back when it was a newspaper) and Racer.

I've been a long time subscriber from back when F1 coverage was spotty at best in the 70's. I've always loved the April issue and some of the April-fools road tests like a Porsche tractor, to a HopRod (powered pogo-stick) to Sam Posey's sled dog experience. I've always wondered how many accidents the the backwards bodied Impala caused in issues when the lamponed themselves in "Rod & Truck". I haven't seen that in years. I still like Eggan's articles, the historical articles such as Gurney back in the F1 Eagle, and some of the technical articles. I get the racing articles from Autoweek (that I used to get back when it was a newspaper) and Racer.

my dad was a R&T subscriber and I have the 50's, 60's and 70's complete and will never part with them
no matter how much the wife bitches about old mags
but droped them after dad died and later switched to autoweek for way faster race reports
most of what I know about F-1 in those days is thanks to HNM and R Walker's race reports and Eion's gossip
as in the USA we had not much else at the time

I have looked at their site and resent issues and they are getting better resently

Is it the type of magazine you can refer to for 'historical fact' - i.e. what actually happened? I have rarely seen anybody cite it as a source.

For me the best part of R&T through the years re:motor racing was the writing as opposed to the detailed race records. However Rob Walker used to do an annual summary of the F1 year that had just ended which was wonderful and did slice data in a way that others didn't (e.g. looking at how many laps particular drivers had led races etc). He also used to grade the drivers.

In answer to Seppi's question (post 35), Road & Track printed a yearly index in their December issue between 1959 and 1990. I can remember my absolute disgust when they printed a feeble disclaimer in December 1991, saying that they "had been forced to cover a plethora of new cars and exciting stories in fewer editorial pages....one casualty of this situation is the annual index." In other words, they had so many ads that there was no room for three pages of index any longer. Bah! They still compiled an index, and you could get one by sending them a SSAE.

I almost daily use my copies of Wallace's "Automotive Literature Index", in three volumes, covering 1947 through 1986, in order to find material in the major automotive journals of these years.

Bob Brzezinski mentions a story about Ferraris, Ray Bell's recollection of Innes learning to steal miltary equipment sounds fantastic, I'm sure he's mentioned it before. I seem to recall hearing about a road story involving Stirling and Innes, and driving the machine that moves the Saturn rockets, was that one?

The story to which I refer was the one where a military truck broke down near the Ireland household during the war. Abandoned, it found itself being brought to life by one of the Ireland children who then went joyriding, finally parking it back where he'd found it minus some of its precious fuel.

Just been trawling through old threads ( a quiet afternoon in the office) & came across this one.

SHMBO & I are empty nesters and some time ago she made "down sizing" noises & "are you aware that your collection of racing magazines is going to cause storage problems in a smaller property".

I started buying Rodent Rack in the sixties, and kept up with it for many years as & when I could find it on the shelf. Henry Manney, Innes Ireland & Rob Walker, what a line up! House moves & lendings out means that I no longer have these early issues, but subsequent gift subsciptions had accrued a substantial holding of copies going back to the eighties.

Co-incidently my last subs. had expired a month earlier & I realised I did not miss it. Apart from Peter Egan - who is superb - the magazine has declined to such an extent that it has disappeared of my personal radar screen.

As the smaller property situation pressure increased, I binned the lot!

While I haven't subscribed to R&T for years now, I've always thought it was a "class" magazine...

My very fond memories of R&T are Rob Walker's GP reports and his driver ratings articles.

And then there were Jon Thompson's annual GP reviews and points tables. I was so impressed that finally, in 2004, I wrote this program using Visual Basic and MS Access to "mimic" what I saw in R&T all those years ago...

I stopped actually reading it very closely at some point in the 1980s, but continued to subscribe out of habit until maybe three or four years ago when I finally dropped it -- after many, many years of reading it (from about 1953/1954). I have not looked at a copy lately, but this might be a good prompt to do so. I was never really "bad," just not what I was really interested in, the salon features being about all I actually did read, generally ignoring the rest of it. I will take the time to take a look.

Well, I took a look. On my way back to this desert paradise several months ago, I picked up a copy of Rodent Crap at one the airports where I was whiling away time between connections. I looking for something to read since I was going through my reading material a bit faster than I anticipated. So, I saw a copy of Rodent Crap and bought it.

I left it on the plane when I got back here.

I was truly underwhelmed.

Something that stirs up in my mind the question of just why are automotive magazines today so universally tepid and lacking? The Rodent Crap was generally bird cage liner. The overall standard of writing was poor to at best, mediocre. Having just left home and while there taking the time to look at a few of the issues from the Fifties, Sixties & Seventies, gave me a fair comparison against which to judge the current product.

What was nice about the old R&T's was that you could often read an article about an event or some trend or happening and it was written in a coherent, sensible fashion and actually something more than mush or drivel we now have to deal with whenever we open the pages of such a magazine today. There is something that actually appears to be "writing" and not, well, whatever it is.

I now pity the young people are being denied the privilege to read articles that allow you to "see" an event in your mind's eye. Of course, people -- especially the young the old as well -- don't read very much any more. I recently re-read "The Great Gatsby" and scarcely a single officer in my section (our Mega Cubicle of Excellence) could claim to have actually read it. Plus, they were absolutely stunned that I would choose such a book for pleasure reading. So imagine what it has been like with "Middlemarch," "A Tale of Two Cities," "Moby Dick," and some of the others I am reading once more (usually for at least the fourth or fifth time).

It is truly sad to realize that for a time we could read articles by HNMIII, DSJ, Pete Lyons, and RRC Walker on a routine basis whereas today....

My memories of R&T are patchy - Henry N Manney remains vivid in my mind, his reports for sure, but specially a travel article about that nude beach island of the south coast of France, illustrated I am sure by Brockbank. Also memorable was the - er - article about the 2CV in the Mille Miglia, driven by one T Trebor Crunchcog.

I now expect several TNFers with much sharper memories than mine, or fewer brain cells dissolved by Aussie lager, to tell me they were both in C&D, or MT, or SCW, but not R&T.

The other US magazine that sticks a little in my mind was Hot Rod Magazine, 1960s. I still occasionally hanker after a really neat T-bucket. Failing that a deuce highboy.

Terry; the article about the nude beach in the south of France is "An Incompleat Guide to the Ile du Levant", by Henry Manney, illustrations by Brockbank, in the March 1964 issue of Road & Track. Right off hand I don't remember the article about a 2CV in the Mille Miglia.

I first came across R&T at the newstand in 1962. It was the September issue and glorious it was! Surely, one of their classic all-time bests. In those days, it was premier and I'd eargerly await the next issue at the local smoke shop ultimately subscribing. I recall the morning of a high-school exam reading one of Henry's bits on an APC instead of doing some last-minute studying.

All good things come to end they say and there was a significant downturn in the late 70's/early 80's. Haven't looked at one in a decade after the content dwindled away to ads, ads and more ads.

Aha, Ile du Levant. I haven't seen that article since I guess 1964, but Manney and Brockbank together made it very funny, and as you can tell, unfortgettable.

The other item was some sort of spoof, with the Crunchcog team laying a slot racing groove around the entire circuit, and Crunchcog driving using a slot car thumb control. Some wonderfully exaggerated cartoons of the car in action. Possibly not R&T, then, or possibly an April edition. And now that I think back, it might have been the Targa Florio, not the Mille Miglia.

All of my R&T mags and a few other titles were binned a couple of decades ago. I regret that now. So, when I see the occasional old R&T mag at the used book stores I buy it. For me it's refreshing to re-discover the past.
My last find was an R&T from March 1987 appropriately starting off with a Winter Racing piece by Peter Egan in Side Glances column followed by Gone…But Not Forgotten by Alan Girdler in the 10/10ths column. For brevity I'll list below the other stimulating articles: